 "Say 'thank you' to your grandmother," or "It is impolite to swear in mixed company"), meta-semantic characterizations of speech are a type of metapragmatic speech.This follows from the assertion that metapragmatic speech characterizes speech function, and denotation or reference are among the many functions of speech.Because metapragmatics describes relations between different discourses it relates crucially to the concepts of intertextuality or interdiscursivity.